THE TROUBLE THRESHOLD: “Yet, whites are not the top performing group. As the Thernstroms point out, the gap between white and Asian-American student performance is actually wider than the gap between blacks and whites, with Hispanics performing about as poorly as blacks.

“Among the most intriguing possible reasons for this disparity is an intriguing group difference in the way students measure their family’s ‘trouble threshold,’ according to one study that the Thernstroms cite. The ‘trouble threshold’ is the lowest grade that students think they can receive before their parents go volcanic with anger and start clamping down on TV time, etc. In the survey by Laurence Steinberg, a Temple University social scientist, published in his 1996 book, Beyond the Classroom, most of the black and Hispanic students surveyed said they could avoid trouble at home as long as their grades stayed above C-minus.

“Most of the whites, by contrast, said their parents would give them a hard time if their children came home with anything less than a B-minus.

“By contrast, most of the Asian students, whether immigrant or native-born, said that their parents would be upset if they brought home anything less than an A-minus.”

Clarence Page, via Eugene Volokh (who notes that this item is “rated S, for ‘Indirectly Quotes Studies That the Author Hasn’t Personally Read'”).